CREW TV

CREW TV brings you closer to the industry's
most influential leaders and thinkers. Click on the videos below to watch the interviews:

Wade Graham - Using social media

Wade Graham, founder of Higher Ground Real Estate Investments, discusses the importance of using social media to find solid business partners

Video transcript below:

Wade Graham, Owner, Higher Ground Real Estate InvestmentsWade Graham: Well the social media certainly isn’t just began, you know largest demographics is baby boomers generation, it’s really getting involved. So a lot of people get hung up on their tools, on the you know what are the mechanics of around what I am doing and I am definitely going to go into how to set up a twitter account, how to set up a facebook account, how to set up a page and how to use those effectively. I always recommend that people take one medium, whether it be youtube, facebook, whatever it is you feel, you feel comfortable with. And start with that first. And focus very strongly on that medium. Once you build a good following and got some good engagement there, it’s a big cloud then possibly branch out, but we are going to get, you know have, not heavy into the tools, but I am going to show some of the tools.

Because I find a lot of people fall down, they get the engagement part, they get that we have to have a conversation but now they don’t know how to have that conversation. What are the tools, how do I measure what it is that I am doing. Is it working? And that’s another area that people fall on big time. A lot of people do this so you know this is one of the big things, you can’t sell on social media. So one of the seven deadly sins of social media is selling, you can’t do it. But we need to sell, we need to be, we need to make money somehow, so how is it we are actually to sell without selling. And most people don’t have that one figured out.

Trust. People do business with people they like, trust and respect and social media gives you the ability to build that relationship and leverage a large network, more and more effectively than you could one on one to start off with. It is not a replacement for having coffee with somebody after you start building that relationship. But over time, they get to know you, they get to understand that you know you like dogs, you’ve got a small kid, you are a real estate investor and people think you are a credible real estate investor. That’s how the momentum starts to build and that takes time.

People will not give you a dime unless they trust you. So that, you know that saying has been true for a millennium and it will be true for the next millennium. How you build that trust changes. It will you know, today’s it’s Twitter and Facebook. Tomorrow I don’t know what it will be. But that need to do that will always exist. You know when I go rock climbing, the person on the end of the rope, I need to have you know explicit trust in him and if I don’t trust that person, we don’t, we don’t push limits, we don’t push boundaries, we stay well within certain comfort zones and same thing in real estate. If people don’t trust you, they are not [to do business with you.]

Well social media gives you, [it] a really easy insight into somebody’s life. You know privacy has changed a lot. Some people are much more open than others, but when people are talking about certain topics and I see other people referring to them and you become an industry leader, then you know that gives you authority so to speak. And I don’t like that term because it sounds all authoritarian but that’s not what I am talking about at all. I am talking about [code], I am talking about the ability to take an audience and move that audience, have them act on your behalf, really a [raving tribe]. Don Campbell has done a fantastic job and he really has, he gets social media, he gets marketing, Don’s a great marketeer and you watch other people engage Don because Don is a great marketeer. So he gets a lot of that secure reciprocal marketing going on. You know Don re-tweets my stuff, I re-tweet his stuff, Julia Broad is getting involved, [Great Hatch] is getting involved. You see a lot of these guys getting involved in the conversation and there’s a reason that they all get involved with one another. It’s quite an interesting, [we see it] in [psychological conversation].

Well social media is, it’s here. People are having conversations over issues, whether you like it or not. The thing I really love about social media is that everybody can get involved and you can be part of that conversation, you can partake in it, you can see what other people are saying and it’s not really about whether or not you want to anymore. It’s how well you do it. And so many people do it very poorly and, but with a little bit of training we could do it really really well. It’s not rocket science.

I believe that not getting involved in social media, you know in the next 5 years, there’s a lot [of action to say your business will be down]. Now the other side of this is, if you go out there and do it poorly, you go out there, you know use tools to build an artificial list of 25,000 followers and all you are doing is sending out automated tweets about I’ve got x product to sell. You know that does not do your business any service in the new medium whatsoever. So yes you are doing your business a service by not being involved. You can also do a service, disservice to your business by being involved poorly. It’s not big rocket science to get involved and a smart educated totally.